Schedule and Abstracts

“Bases Loaded” is a curriculum designed to teach English to professional baseball players. This curriculum could serve to standardize the English teachings done across all teams. Standardizing teachings for these players would facilitate communications across teams as players are often traded each season. This curriculum contains units on conversational English, media prep, baseball terminology and jargon, and basic medical terminology related to common baseball injuries. Through completing this curriculum, players will be able to confidently communicate with teammates, umpires, the press and fans, coaches and trainers, and medical staff. 

This presentation examines the effectiveness of teaching Language Learning Strategies (LLS) to Pre-Academic (non-matriculated) and matriculated ESL students in order for them to become autonomous language learners. Autonomy is defined through the psychological concept of self regulation. Self regulation is an integral aspect of what prominent scholars in the field of Language Learning Strategies have identified in successful language learners. This presentation provides ESL Teachers with a Theoretical Framework,  A Conceptual understanding of Language Learning Strategies, and finally, practical applications to promote autonomous language learners ready for future academic contexts. 

This presentation investigates the impact of oral feedback and feedback engagement on EFL learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC). Oral feedback and learners' engagement with feedback are interrelated and affect students’ eagerness to communicate. I present several strategies concerning how to offer constructive feedback while promoting learners' active participation, leading to linguistic improvement. 

My Capstone project investigates the role of intertextuality in academic reading and writing pedagogy, as underpinned by Fairclough (1992). Intertextuality emphasizes the importance of how texts socially influence each other within academic discourse. The project identifies effective pedagogical practices and provides guidelines to integrate intertextuality in teaching, aiming to connect theoretical perspectives with practical application. The findings serve as a resource for educators to enhance L2 learners’ academic literacy through intertextuality.

Despite the lack of literature on neurodiversity within composition studies, a new standard model for structuring a composition classroom needs to be considered to best support students of all abilities. In this paper, I offer a number of strategies and pedagogical recommendations for course structure, assessment, activities, and grading that can help instructors bridge the gap between dis/ability and academic achievement and build on the emerging area of study regarding neurodiversity in the context of writing programs and the first-year composition classroom.

First-generation college students encounter various obstacles, including (but not limited to) financial insecurity and family obligations, which can affect their social, emotional, and academic needs, ultimately impacting their academic identity development and support networks. Drawing from scholarly literature and personal experiences, I will propose strategies to raise awareness and advocate for a more compassionate, diverse, and inclusive approach to supporting FGCS throughout their college journey.

This paper is focused on the ESL classroom, incorporating non-academic reading into an ESL class. Graphic novels and comic books are rarely used in the ESL classroom. There have been valuable studies that apply various language learning activities with comic books and graphic novels for different types of students (ELL, ESL, EFL) . The theoretical frameworks that I have chosen supports the researchers' hypothesis that students using comic books and graphic novels have increased reading comprehension and vocabulary and as a result have motivated them to continue learning English.

My presentation examines the conceptual frameworks and semantic inferences of gender structured through gender expansive labels in English. Gender has become a contentious topic due to conflict between dominant and emerging ideologies of identity. I explore possession, additive, and contestation models of gender by analyzing common gender expansive labels. Through cognitive semantic analysis of the labels themselves and individual descriptions of gender identities, I highlight the effects and power of labeling and framing in promoting particular models of gender.

Digital Storytelling (DST) seeks to grant agency and develop instrumental and communicative multiliteracy skills by transforming identities through critical dialogue and reflection. Aligning course design with an information age that prefers (digital) human stories may produce authentic meaning-making and learner engagement. Through a literature review on DST within a transformative language learning and teaching (TLLT) framework, I introduce complementary pedagogy that may inspire purposeful action among participants while also transforming the trajectories of told and yet to be told human stories.

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly influencing the way people get information and make decisions. Although most research is done in English, LLMs are developing rapidly in many languages. Using the Japanese translation of the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) as a case study, this work discusses benchmark tests in commonsense reasoning and world knowledge. It describes two experimental studies comparing humans and ChatGPT on the Japanese WSC. Results show that humans outperform ChatGPT and differ in naturalness judgments. This data contributes to a high-level analytical discussion of the WSC as a benchmark test for modern LLMs. 

My research explores how our understanding of physical force underpins the semantics of modal verbs. I examine two key modals – “will” and its distal form “would.” I argue that at their core, these modals evoke the concept of volitional force, or willpower. Volitional force metaphorically extends to our understanding of future certainty and habitual actions. Furthermore, I examine the hypothetical uses of “would” and argue that invoking volition prompts us to imagine hypothetical scenarios that are free from the limitations imposed by our everyday reality.

When fake news spreads faster than it did before the internet, social media algorithms are becoming more effective with AI, and authoritarianism looms in the U.S., first-year composition teachers should develop students’ information, digital, and rhetorical literacies. This will help students develop civic literacy, which is important for critical citizenship. After making the case for this curriculum, I will demonstrate how composition teachers can develop their students’ civic literacy.

The term “telop” broadly refers to captions that overlaid onto Japanese TV programs. The role of telop is a murky one for the Japanese public at large. My study claims that telop function like memes as defined by biologist Richard Dawkins. He describes memes as “the unit of cultural transmission” from person to person, containing information that transforms human culture. Telop and memes share essential qualities. In this paper, I will analyze the functions of telop, and discuss how they affect Japanese language learning.

My Capstone examines inroads to designing themes for a First Year Composition course. Educator strengths and student engagement are highlighted. While ample literature exists debating theme efficacy, and a great deal of material exists extolling specific examples of them, a dearth exists exploring methodology for building any given theme, so this paper helps instructors navigate theory and practicum therein. I argue thematic development has to center the match between material the educator can expound upon while modeling inquiry and that we must concurrently amplify the inherent value of students’ stories and curiosities.

In this presentation, I discuss the difficulties of encouraging students to speak up in class, the impact of digital class participation (particularly during COVID), along with reasons to push for a more comprehensive communication student learning objective in the K-12 curriculum. I also go over the alternatives for inclusive verbal class participation with deaf/hard of hearing students and analyze research revolving around international students and complete the presentation with a guide for educators to implement in their own fields.

Social media's potential to boost engagement and writing skills in First-Year Composition (FYC) is explored here. Research examines how platforms like Facebook can foster digital literacy and reshape traditional writing practices. By analyzing studies on online learning and technology's impact, this project highlights how social media can enrich writing instruction and create a more engaged student body. This research aims to equip educators with the knowledge to integrate social media into FYC, preparing students for the digital demands of higher education.